Missing You

One way to improve mood, surprisingly, may be to imagine not having someone or something you treasure. Minkyung Koo, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, and her team had people write about a cherished individual or object—either how it became part of their lives or what life would be like without it. The group who explored the effects of absence felt better about their present lives or relationships afterward than did those who wrote the positive essays. The study authors call this "the George Bailey effect," alluding to the film It's a Wonderful Life, in which a suicidal man improves his outlook after an angel shows him the world as it would have been had he never been born. "To reinvigorate a relationship, for example, it might be better for people to think about how they might never have met their partner than to recount the story of how they did," the researchers write.